Recent reviews by BadPanda

IF YOU'RE THINKING ABOUT BUYING THIS GAME DESPITE NEGATIVE REVIEWS & TL DR:

Someone else said this:
"What's good about it: Takes you a couple of hours to realize how bad the game is, so at least you get a couple of hours of gameplay out of it"

That's actually the worst part about this game. With so much falsity and wanting to like the game, espcially considering it's an exploration game, you will pass the two hour mark, not even really enjoy it, and then end up with buyer's remorse. That's how they dupe you with their pre-alpha style release. I even tried to request a refund after double-checking the policy and seeing they sometimes make exceptions. I stopped at 8 hours. I may play in the future to try and get my moneys worth when they make improvements if you see longer playtime. You can still save your money, at least wait for a sale or some serious updates.

END TL DR

That being said, here are my legitimate criticisms below for the game from someone who's pc even with a radeon 7770 (no other bottlenecks, plan to upgrade card soon) ran the game with no issues or crashes. I even knew the game wasn't really multiplayer, so I'm not even factoring that in.
I'll be comparing a lot of things to the trailers as we go forward.


On Planets and Landing: The game doesn't allow me to do tight close manuevers near the planet in order to *ahem* explore and see the surface better. In the trailers, I didn't see any sort of strange rubber bandy type "anti-crashing" mechanics. Even when you have plenty of room, it's hard to nose down for a clearer view. Furthermore, after 5 hours (even some of the 8 hours wasn't me), I didn't know how to land the ship on one of those pads shown in one of the trailers. Also, I only managed to land directly next to landmarks about 50% of the time with the other half of the time requiring me to walk upwards of 25-30 seconds to the thing I wanted to land DIRECTLY NEXT to, but because of the stupid press-e to land straight down vertically, and the inability to fly close to the ground, I'd be much further away than I intended.

In Space: In the trailers you can quickly go from planet to planet and feel truly like the universe is at your fingertips. Or like you can just skip a planet if you aren't interested. NOPE. In the game they actually released, once you are even in space, if you point towards a planet, it will say it's two hours away - so then you activate your pulse drive, no big deal right? Well, the trailers didn't even need that. So now you're going through space at hyperspeed, and that time changes from 2 hours to... 90 seconds give or take? 90 seconds and you literally can't do ANYTHING during that period. Then the planet looks like everything else you've seen. Bad luck I guess. Oh and between galaxies when you literally click to travel on a star map, that doesn't take the 3 seconds in the trailer, it takes anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds and this time it doesn't tell you.


First off, there's no convenient way back to your ship, and the station things to call your ship aren't guaranteed at every outpost, plus, they require something to use - it's easy to make, but inventory management in this game is very poor, so you may have thrown out the garbage materials required to make it. Then you have to mine some and throw away other things, awesome right? Well might as well just fly your ship from place to place. Well that sucks too, because the flying mechanics are bad, and even though it's easy to recharge your launch thrusters, it's another nuissance that gets in the way. Plus, walking/running/jumping feels more authentic. In fact trekking a planet is only bearable due to the ability to change your jetpacks momentum to a more horizontal trajectory by meleeing before you hold space. Funny because that's probably unintentional.

So you decide to go on foot but you never know how far you're willing to go away from your ship. I didn't even get to any difficult planets or combat situations and I just didn't want to go from outpost to outpose every couple minutes and see that it's a 5-minute walk back to my ship, a 2-minute walk back to the last ship-whistle I saw, or an unknown time to potentially find a ship whistle. I personally opted to continuously get on my ship despite the cons of poor manueverablity, landing, and launch-jet refueling, for the ability to see more.


Here's all the issues in short statements: Too many different inventories. Too small of inventories. Questionably useful resources. Too small of stacks. Some items don't stack. Some items like power cells which would have to stack in order to be useful, don't. Trading terminals don't seem to always automatically access both your suit and ship inventory like it implies. I think the ship has to be close enough? (Sidenote to all this: I had my suit max upgraded and I had the pre-order ship which had decent space for starting out).


The aliens and the outposts are stale; discovering their languages is interesting but too slow considering there aren't unique ways to do it.

I visited about 6 planets and I think 4 of them were a grey or brown wasteland. In fact, two had no animals, the others had about 1 or 2. Call me unlucky, but I was hoping to see some green before the 5-6 hour mark. I also saw no water. I'm not saying all I wanted to see was exactly the screenshots, but c'mon those are the screenshots on the store page for a reason.

The gameplay loop and desire to progress: I haven't talked about mining much yet, or mods, but basically that's because that was the least fun part of the game because nothing felt significant or exciting enough to spend the time to mine. Since Mining is a grind, I just did as little of it as I could.

The Falsehood: Why I feel cheated:

I didn't expect this game to be the craziest game or even to have multiplayer.

I did expect however, to actually see areas that WERE lush like the trailer. Not everywhere, but I mean, some brontosaurus looking things and some herds running through a lush areas with a crystal blue oasis? There needs to be moments like those at least every hour or so when exploring. SOMETHING to keep my curiosity. I didn't have a singular experience that was memorable or visually stunning. Most of the creatures are pretty dumb too; I love a good laugh, but seriously, like 75% of the time?

I did expect some greater interaction with NPC spaceships, and some more clear opportunities or reasons to have some dogfighting in space. Spaceships never just randomly flew with me into space and had battles for me to join or anything interesting. When I got an alert that pirates were nearby, I felt more like the game was just introducing unecessary difficulties for the sake of necessitating progression elements and difficulty as you get closer to the core, rather than to keep things refreshing and spontaneous. The drones on the planets serve the same function, but I had no issues killing them which apparently some people did.


I honestly do hope they make it better so I have a reason to play it in the future and get my moneys worth, even though I'm bitter that I paid $60 to not play it until much much later when if they do release a major update to bring in players, it will be with a large sale.

I also hear that DLC might not be free either even though they said it would be. The game is riddled with problems and that they could even think about paid DLC boggles my mind.

I'm sure this game could be fun to others, but I felt underwhelmed by the tactical play. It really is worse than a standard fps. It's too clunky, often switching perspectives from 3rd to first, making it hard to aim, and targets are often barely visible. This is understandable given the push-pull dynamic of the gameplay. Furthermore, I found the games performance sub-par considering there is nothing special about the visuals. I can play much more demanding games even on my old computer with no problems. The fun factor for me was just too low. TF2 is free, play that if anything.